Is it right? Does the criminal ultimately deserve it? Is it serving justice? These are all questions regarding whether Capital punishment is morally justified or not. It has been practiced since civilization started and people have had free will. It has also been a topic that has been argued for and against, for hundreds of years. In this paper I will argue that capital punishment is morally justified and should be allowed.
If a man goes on a killing spree, it is easily determined that he does not look at life in the same way as everyone else. It would be known that this person has no regard for human life. Who would want to live with a person like this in society? In these cases if a jury filled with people who live along side this person sentences him to death unanimously, then he deserves it.
Yes, some people will say, “Well what if the jury is wrong and kill an innocent man?” This is a valid point, after all people are human and make mistakes. It is very plausible that someone could be deceived into thinking someone is guilty when they are actually not. You can never be 100% sure all the facts have been accounted for and they are 100% accurate. There are too many things that go into an investigation to assume all is correct.
The big thing people who fall in the category above are forgetting is how hard it is for a group of randomly selected people in a jury to agree on anything, let alone unanimously. That means all of them. Not one of them sees any reasonable doubt that the person committed the crime, and should not be sentenced to death. You put a random group of people together and they wouldn’t even be able to decide what movie to go see, let alone if someone deserves to die. That is why a unanimous decision is so powerful. There must be sufficient evidence for this to happen.
That brings me to the evidence. Yes, in the last decade there have been cases overturned because of DNA testing. However, Those DNA tests can now be used to see if the person is the killer and should be convicted. These days technology is so accurate that if a crime came down to a blood test or things of that nature, it is over 99% accurate. If they run the test twice the accuracy is even greater. Because of the DNA testing and other technologies, if jury has been given that type of evidence they can look at it with certainty, and make a decision. Because of these two points the argument of possibly killing an innocent person is less and less effective.
Capital punishment is also morally justified because the criminal had a chance to be a part of society and was a danger to all of the people. In the crimes that Capital punishment can be used for, like mass murders, the criminal has no chance of ever being accepted back into society and has no reason to stay alive. Sending the Criminal to jail is essentially the same thing, they have no life or contact with people and they are still dangerous.
That brings me to my second point. Killing one person who has, and could kill many people, is necessary to protect the people. It is the “spare one to save many” saying that I am referencing. If one person is such a threat to the people in the world and is doing damage to the society then his death is necessary for the society to grow. The Death penalty also acts as a warning to people that if they go in killing sprees or mass murders they will be killed. So it works to prevent things like that from happening, and if it does happen it stops it.
The people who oppose the Death penalty will respond to this by saying, “Your killing someone for killing someone, isn’t that a contradiction.” If you are saying killing is wrong, then why are you killing? It makes no sense, you are sending a wrong message to society. This is like the eye for an eye punishment back in ancient governments, and the world is past all of that. They are still human and they have their human rights to live. It is not up to us who lives and who dies, some say its god and others just by chance. Either way the people opposing will always say we don’t have the right to take the life out of someone.
This is easily the best argument brought up by people opposing the Death Penalty. After all they are right, the Death penalty is the act of killing people for killing people. But for this I have two very strong replies. First, it is dangerous to have someone that is a mass murderer to be in prison. It is dangerous for the other inmates, it is dangerous to the guards, and it is dangerous for the people in the society. The mass murderer could potentially harm other inmates who have a chance to become part of society again and we have to protect him. You can never know what a person like that is thinking and that puts the security guards in danger as well. The Criminal could attack and harm a guard at any time. On top of all this it is possible that the criminal gets out of the prison for some reason and starts killing again. If the Criminal is sentenced to the Death penalty this problem goes away, and he is no longer a threat to the people.
My second reply, and the stronger of the two, is that the criminal loses his human rights to live when he takes the lives of others and becomes a problem to society. This goes back to Thomas Hobbes, and his human nature argument that says humans do what they have to, to live in peace. If you take his theory and apply it to this, it means that the people have to get rid of the person causing the disruption in society. You cannot just put the person in prison for life because he is still a severe threat to the people in the prison. Once a person infringes upon another person’s ability to live in peace, then they are subject to whatever the person does to them. In this case it would be the victims’ families pressing charges and a jury sentencing the criminal to death. Therefore the killing of a criminal is just preserving the peace of the people.
In this paper I have argued that the Death Penalty is morally justified and should be allowed. I looked at two opposing viewpoints; it’s possible that a jury could kill an innocent man, and that killing someone for killing is a contradiction. Both of these were very strong arguments and made a very strong case. However, the fact that the jury has to agree unanimously for someone to be put to death, and how today technology is is so effective, successfully replies to the first opposition. For the second opposition, the best opposition, it was harder to reply to. That brought me to my strongest reply, which is that the criminal loses his human rights to live when he infringes on others to live peacefully. That argument successfully beats any argument put out by the opposition. That is why the Death Penalty is morally justified and should be allowed.
Source: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cp.htm
